"Drop And Cover If You See A Bright Flash," Doctors Urge

TUCSON, Ariz., Jan. 10, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- At the time of the Emergency Management Agency of Utah (UEMA) conference on Jan 9, 2014, Physicians for Civil Defense issued the following statement:

All Americans, starting with first responders and emergency managers, need to know this basic life-saving principle: "Drop and cover if you see a sudden very bright light."

Such a light will be followed by a deadly shock wave within seconds. Those who drop and cover will probably survive. Those who do not are likely to be killed or suffer severe injury.

During the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor explosion, a fourth-grade teacher in Chelyabinsk, Yulia Karbysheva, saved 44 children from potentially life-threatening window glass cuts by ordering them to hide under their desks when she saw the flash. Ms. Karbysheva, who remained standing, was seriously lacerated when the explosion's blast wave arrived and windows shattered. A tendon in her arm was severed, but not one of her students suffered a cut.

"Large meteor strikes are sufficiently probable that both the U.S. and Russia are working on ways to divert them. In 1908 a meteor strike flattened 800 square miles of Siberian forest," stated president Jane M. Orient, M.D.